Tag: Queer As Folk

It’s over. It’s dead. 0/10 – Doctor Who – The Church on Ruby Road – Review

Before the 2023 specials, I was cautiously optimistic that Doctor Who could come back from death. There had been a number of concerning pieces of information that had come out in the lead up to these specials and the next series, but I remained hopeful.

The specials were a mixture of underwhelming, mediocre, and infuriating – not so much a problem if only one episode is like that, but all three were. Together, they were the worst writing I have ever seen from Davies – by far.

We’ve now been given a Christmas special – which I’m treating as the first episode of the next series, even though I think officially it’s not. I was optimistic about Gatwa as the Doctor – particularly in contrast to Jodie Whittaker, who was shit. But this optimism was misplaced.

This was one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen. (In fairness, I didn’t actually watch a lot of the Whittaker run – including that episode with all the ‘timeless child’ bollocks – my sense of how bad those episodes are comes from watching other reviews – it’s a much less visceral sense.) I award this episode 0 out of 10. I don’t think I’ve ever given anything 0 out of 10 before.

This episode completely and utterly shattered the immersion. You know those shatterproof rulers you used to have in school? Remember how ear-splitting the snap was when you did try to shatter it? That’s what this episode did to Doctor Who. This episode was so unlike Doctor Who, that when I was watching it, it was like I was watching another show. It was like I was watching one of Davies’ gay shows: Queer As Folk, Cucumber, It’s A Sin. Everything about it – the pacing, the aesthetics, the tone, the setting – was just like from one of those shows. This wasn’t a new series of Doctor Who – this was a new series of Queer As Folk.

The moment in the episode that exemplified this the most was the Doctor dancing in a nightclub, wearing a low-cut tank top and a skirt. (People will say that it’s a kilt, but to me its form appeared closer to a skirt – and given the gender-bending obsession of Russell these last few episodes, it seems plausible.) This moment is what drops the score to 0/10. There was actually one good thing in this episode (just one), but this nightclub scene was so bad that any and all remaining points are deducted.

I’ve already seen the qwerties of Twitter desperately trying to defend this shit. All the arguments boil down to the same thing: the qwerties like going to nightclubs themselves so they want the Doctor to as well – because god forbid the qwerties watch any character who isn’t identical to them.

The Doctor spinning around, arms in the air, grinning like a woman from HR getting kompromat on an employee at an office party, wearing a tank top that would be considered racy even in the queue for a glory hole, all while the most bland, directionless, meaningless, tuneless, non-music echoes in the background, and support dancers surround him, screwing their faces as hard as they can in a desperate attempt to suggest profundity, is a moment that shows us a character that is in no way connected to the actual Doctor at all. This is not the Doctor. This is so utterly incompatible with anything we have previously seen of the Doctor’s character, that all we can conclude is that this is not the Doctor. The immersion has been snapped. We are no longer watching Doctor Who – we are just watching Ncuti Gatwa dancing in a nightclub. That’s it.

Gatwa should be utterly humiliated by this. The absolute worst thing for you, as an actor, should be the audience not seeing the character – only seeing you. If that happens, it shows that you have utterly failed as an actor. We are not supposed to see you; we are supposed to see the character. This episode, in my opinion, seriously damages Gatwa’s career. I would hope that his agent is shouting down the phone to Russell at this very moment for allowing this to go out on television.

Nothing – nothing at all – about Gatwa as he appears here is reminiscent about William Hartnell’s portrayal of the Doctor. It’s laughable to even mention them in the same sentence. As I say – this isn’t Doctor Who – it’s an extra episode of Queer As Folk. Even worse, this moment has fuck all to do with the rest of the episode – it’s just there to make a statement.

The rest of the episode is little better: an inexplicable voice-over at the start (Russell seems rather keen on those at the moment), a lot of wasted time and dialogue (this episode could have been 15 minutes shorter), a grotesque set design for the apartment (it looked like the 70s had thrown up all over it), some pointless and unrealistic dialogue from the supporting actors (and some ghastly acting too – particularly from the actors who played the next-door neighbours).

Gatwa’s non-character claims to discover a new kind of science in this episode: the science of luck. Once again Russell is showing his recent lapse into unoriginality here – he did a similar thing in that episode about Shakespeare in series three. Gatwa’s non-character also claims to be ‘learning the vocabulary of rope’ as he tries to understand some knots. He’ll be gutted to discover that topology has already been studied and well understood for decades.

There is one good thing in this episode, and that’s the CGI for the goblins – they’ve done that very well. The goblin king is also fun and well-designed. (Although again, Russell shows his unoriginality – this goblin king is very similar to the one in The Hobbit.)

Unfortunately the goblins are ruined by their giving us a musical number. An overly-heavy beat and a trumpet that sounds like an Argos keyboard isn’t something anyone with a mental age greater than three wants, Russell. You might think that couldn’t get worse, but it does – with the addition of an autotuned Gatwa and side-kick (I forget her name – she’s quite a forgettable character).

There’s a hilarious moment when a woman in the nightclub shouts ‘Give us some willie!’ at a man pretending to be a woman on the stage. I think it’s supposed to be ‘Give it some wellie!’ – the perils of enunciation.

I’m surprised that the qwerties weren’t outraged by the goblins in this episode. After all, the qwerties insist, time and time again, that Rowling’s use of goblins in Harry Potter was antisemitic. In this episode, goblins are not only present, but they literally steal and eat children. They are also the cause of all the misfortune in everyone’s life. Why on earth the qwerties aren’t screaming antisemitism at this episode, I don’t know. (But consistency of position was never their strength.) I also notice that no-one asked each other what their ‘preferred pronouns’ were in this episode. According to Russell, this is bigotry, so I guess we are supposed to consider all of these characters bigots.

And all the remaining time in the episode is just filled with virtue signalling and The Message.

That was an absolutely atrocious episode. With that episode and the three that preceded it – all of which had a multitude of serious, serious flaws – I am forced to conclude that Doctor Who is well and truly dead. Completely and utterly dead. There is no point watching the rest of Gatwa’s series. I won’t be watching it or reviewing it.

Doctor Who should be cancelled. What the franchise needs is to be left alone – for at least a decade. Leave it alone; do nothing with it. Whoever picks it up again after that will be someone entirely different – hopefully someone who hasn’t been infected with this idiocy virus. It’s rare that I will outright call for a show to end, but now I am: cancel it. This also represents the downfall of Russell T. Davies. He has written many excellent shows over the years: Queer As Folk was well-written for what it was (I just don’t want Doctor Who to become it); Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, and It’s A Sin were all fun; and of course, the first four series’ of New Who. But these episodes have been an absolute disaster. Russell appears to have lost his talent.

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent. 

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare. 

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.